Making Sense of Metadata Mess

Biologists study Diatoms, a fundamental algae, to assess the health of aquatic systems. Diatom specimens have traditionally been preserved on analog slides, where a single slide can contain thousands of these microscopic organisms. Digitization of these collections presents both metadata challenges and opportunities. This presentation reports on metadata research aimed at providing access to a digital portion of the Academy of Natural Sciences’ Diatom Herbarium, Drexel University. It was presented at the MTSR 2024 conference. We report results of a 3-part study covering a review of relevant metadata standards and a microscopy metadata framework shared by Hammer et al. a baseline metadata alignment mapping current diatom metadata properties to standard metadata types a metadata risk analysis associated with the course of standard data curation practices. This research is part of an effort involving the transfer of these digital slides to an new system, DataFed, to support global access.